No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (26 page)

That’s a lot of Clarice, in the last few days, for Mel to think about.

They began to cackle like witches. The life of a woman, eh. The shit you had to endure. The mucoid indignities you were expected to submit to. Mel too had had her pants snatched off her in her time. Been bent over desks and benches and kitchen tables. Been kicked out of her home by crazily jealous lovers whose features had shrunk to the size of a rodent’s arse. Been punched in the eye. Been forced to wander the streets unshowered while the unwanted sperm ran like treacle down her legs.

‘Frank’s?’

‘No. Frank’s the other kind of bully.’

‘What kind’s that?’

Did Mel want to be talking to Clarice about Frank? Was that a good idea? ‘The receiving end kind.’

‘Frank likes you to bully him?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Do you bend him over the desk?’

‘Of course not. It’s more mental than that. It’s his mind he wants me to damage.’

‘And how do you do that?’

‘Well I don’t do it. That’s the trouble. The trouble for Frank, I mean.’

‘But what would you be doing if you did do it?’

How? What? Why? Redder than the evening sky, Clarice’s avidity. Hungrier than the sea.

How smart was this, Mel wondered. She rose from the bench, turning her eyes from the burn. ‘You want to know what Frank wants of me?’

Silly question. Forget Molly Bloom. Molly Bloom had time only for her own itch. Clarice’s unpunctuated curiosity embraced the itch of everyone she encountered. When it came to sexual tittle-tattle, she was the Jane Austen of Little Cleverley. One day a sign would be erected on the west bank of the Tamar, welcoming you to Clarice Country. In the meantime, of course Clarice wanted to know what Frank wanted of Mel.

‘What I think Frank wants, and has always wanted, is to feel ill. I think he’s wanted that with every woman. But I’ve been privileged – with me he believes he can feel more ill than he’s ever felt before.’

‘Ill while you’re fucking?’

‘In a way, yes. Ill around the whole business. Either that, or he’s a moron. Only a moron, or someone who thrives on trouble, would do what he does …’

Thinking about her life with a moron, or someone who thrives on trouble, Mel allows her voice to drift away into the immensity of the sky, where the first of the evening stars is waiting to swallow it up.

But Clarice’s needs are greater than any faraway prick of light’s. ‘Which is what? What does he do?’

‘He invites torment. He comes at me when I’m bound to turn on him. He knows exactly what rubs me up the wrong way but he won’t learn from the experience. He would rather lay himself bare to my impatience every time. That can only be because he likes the humiliation of rejection, wouldn’t you say? Unless he’s a moron.’

‘Sounds like you make him very happy.’

Mel thinks about it. But not for long. ‘No, I don’t make him happy. No one can make Frank happy. It doesn’t matter how hard a time I give him, it’s never hard enough. I’m still not able to deliver him the final blow he craves. You know how men are always terrified that you’re going to show them up in some way, embarrass them or betray them in public, make fools of them before the world? I think Frank wants me to do it once and for all. Hit him with the killer blow. Deliver him from the fear of it.’

Now it’s Clarice’s turn to have a little think. ‘Is that what I’ve done to Elkin? Hit him with the killer blow?’

‘You may have. Though I have to say that Elkin has always struck me as more self-sufficient than Frank. He isn’t sitting there waiting for it to happen. He has other preoccupations.’

‘Hasn’t Frank?’

‘Frank? No. Frank has only one preoccupation. Feeling ill and waiting to feel iller. The masochistic little bastard.’

‘Frank’s a masochist?’

‘Oh God, yes.’

‘So why don’t you just pull out all the stops and give him what he wants?’

‘Give a
man
what he wants!’

How they laughed. How they cackled.

But Mel, conscientious Mel, wasn’t altogether satisfied with her answer. ‘But I guess the real reason is that it isn’t what I want.’

‘Which is what?’

‘What do I want? Oh, I suppose I want the same as him. For me, I mean. That’s the trouble. I’m a masochist too.’

Clarice opened her eyes wide, then tapped the space on the bench which Mel had vacated. Come back here, Mel. Talk to me. Tell me. Spill all to Clarice.

Under the shower in Mel’s cottage Clarice washed away the last of Elkin’s impetuous seed.

Frank was out for the afternoon. Faxing his column from St Austell. No machines allowed in the cottage. Mel sat in a rocking-chair by the low leaded window and tried not to look at the steam ghosting out from under the stripped pine bathroom door. She could hear Clarice still laughing in the shower. It reminded Mel of the sound of a school playground. A warm milky odour, reminiscent of a kindergarten, filled the cottage – everyone stretched out on their little beds for a mid-morning nap. Mel fought not to let herself be overwhelmed by any of those mothering instincts she’d painstakingly excluded from her life. She wanted to warm a bottle. No she didn’t. She wanted to inhale the smell of brand new life from Clarice’s scalp. No she didn’t. She wanted to give Clarice pocket money. Yes, she did. Here, a nice bright new-minted one pound coin, now go home.

When Clarice emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel like a boiled sweet, pearls of water sitting on her skin like icing sugar, Mel turned away.

‘I could kill a gin,’ Clarice said.

But there was no gin in the cottage. Not allowed. No machines, no alcohol. Want to fax? Go to St Austell. Want to drink? Go to the pub. Compulsiveness – that was what she was trying to beat. The noise and riot of habituated appetite.

If Clarice wanted a drink it would have to be The Poldark.

No, not The Poldark. Elkin would be in his corner of The Poldark, grinning into his tankard.

She was frightened of Elkin?

Of course not. No one could be frightened of Elkin. She was punishing him, that was all… Giving him a hard time.

So they decided they would go, the two witches, to The Frenchman instead. More of an emmet pub. Children’s room. Bottled lagers. Scampi in a basket. Just the place to be if you wanted to gossip unheeded.

What impulse was it that made Mel think twice after she had locked the cottage, sent her back inside, told her to leave, at the very least, a terse note for Frank on the scrubbed pine table? –
IN THE FRENCHMAN.

A loving impulse.

And what impulse was it that made Mel ask for champagne, in a bucket, and two, no, make that three glasses?

The same.

They sat facing each other across a round brown table, deaf to emmet commotion, and raised their flutes – you didn’t get a flute at The Poldark, but then you didn’t get champagne at The Poldark either – in a toast to Elkin.

‘And to Molly Bloom,’ Mel laughed.

‘Did I overdo it?’ Clarice asked.

‘Not if you were happy for the whole of Little Cleverley to see everything you’ve got.’

Clarice shrugged and swigged. The whole of Little Cleverley already had, that was what her shrug denoted.

She loved flashing herself. She looked at Mel through the bubbles of her champagne, swirling it in the glass to keep it frothing. She just
loved
flashing. Didn’t Mel?

No, Mel thought on the whole she didn’t. But then Mel acknowledged that she had become a prude. Where her own body was concerned, she meant. She wasn’t a prude for Clarice.

What Clarice loved best was showing herself to men when Elkin was there, but just out of eyeline. She flashed in the shop sometimes. She’d select a man she knew she could embarrass, someone wearing badges or mountaineering boots, someone with five kids in tow, someone carrying National Trust literature, and just as Elkin was getting to the bit about the antique value of the slates he painted on, whoosh! up would come the skirt and out would come the cunt. It was terrifically good for business. They would always return, the men she’d flashed at. Next year, on the dot, there they’d be in their badges and their toggles, their eyes soft and pleading like those of a favoured pet. Over time she grew to recognise some of them. And those she recognised she teased the hardest, making them wait for hours before she whipped her skirt up, forcing them to wander round and round the shop like connoisseurs of slate-art, up and down until they knew every particular hair on the head of every particular field-mouse on every particular slate. And then, just as they thought it was not to be and maybe never had been, was nothing but a filthy figment of their fevered imaginations, a Cornish chimera, a vapour, a wispy illusion … whoosh! there it was again.

She took even greater risks with the local boys, who knew to ring her doorbell between six and seven in the evening, at the time Elkin could be relied upon to be beard down in his
supper. Three long rings, followed by one short. Then eyes to her letterbox. Clarice would be standing in the hallway with her skirt ready. The moment the flap trembled, she raised her skirt. Sometimes she would press her body to the hole in the door and give them a close-up. If she was really in the mood she would let them touch her, blow on her, smell her, finger her, make her come.

‘What I especially like,’ she told Mel, ‘is never being certain whose fingers they are. That’s what makes me come. Does that shock you?’

No one in Little Cleverley knew how Melissa Paul earned her living. Mel, that was the only name they knew her by. Some sort of a journalist. ‘No,’ she said, laughing, ‘of course it doesn’t shock me. I’ve always thought sex is best with people you don’t know. Sex with people you can’t see either, sounds better still.’

But she was making mental notes. Lady Serenissima Montefiore, heroine of
Yes, My Lady,
who invites the kitchen hands at Montefiore House to poke their penises through the letterbox of the oak door to the great hall, on the other side of which she waits on her knees with her mouth open, finishing
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
interfellatio – something to chew on between violations – originated in this conversation.

It wasn’t just sex with people you didn’t know and couldn’t see that Clarice liked. It was coming in places you didn’t normally associate with coming. She’d got sick of coming only in bed. The hallway, on the coconut mat, with Elkin obliviously tucking into his supper above, beat bed all ends up.

Mel knew exactly what she meant. Fucking beds. She’d fought this one out with Frank, who thought coming was not only a bed event but a morning event. Preferably prone. Preferably not fully awake.

Oh, yes yes. Men prone in the mornings. Their dicks their only waking part. The sheer uninventive mechanicalness of them. They cackled on. Witches sistered in the conventional domestic come.

Mel called for another bottle of champagne. ‘So what it amounts to,’ she said, raising her glass, ‘is that every boy in the village has seen your cunt.’

Clarice raised hers. ‘And every man.’

A pause. Was there a pause? ‘Including Frank?’

‘Excluding Frank.’

‘Poor Frank. What’s he done wrong?’

‘You’re my friend.’

Aha. Mel knew all about friends. ‘How can you be sure he hasn’t seen your cunt through the letterbox?’

‘I’d have recognised his eyes.’

‘You know Frank’s eyes that well?’

‘They’re distinct.’

‘So Frank misses out…’

Another pause. Was that another pause? Hard to tell when you’re into champagne bottle number two. ‘I could always show it to him,’ Clarice offered, ‘while you’re there.’

Mel thought about that. ‘He might not want to see it while I’m there.’

Now there was a pause. Before Clarice found just the right words. ‘Who cares what he wants!’

They laughed. Their eyes met through their winking champagne flutes. Danced. Acidified.

Suddenly they were in competition. Who would blink first?

It was at that moment that Frank turned up.

‘Go on then,’ Mel said. ‘Show him.’

And Clarice did.

C
ONSIDERING HOW LITTLE
he has ever liked pubs, Frank has to concede that they have been good to him over the years.

He checks with Vera that his room is ready for him at The Poldark, collects his stuff from the car, plugs in his batteries, freshens up in the sink – the bathroom is down a flight of stairs and he is all at once too impatient for that kind of palaver – and strides over to the Slate Gallery.

The rain has stopped, but the shop is full anyway. Midspiel, Elkin nods his beard at him. Then turns away to expel someone licking an ice-cream. There are more no-eating signs in Elkin’s slate shop than there are slates. But the signs never stop them. For signs to work people must have been taught to read.

Clarice is standing behind the till with her arms folded on her chest. Bored. Not impossibly selecting a flash victim. She has not perceptibly aged. The mouth is a little more fixed, otherwise she is as cascading as she was. Her eyes splinter like a shattered windshield when she catches sight of Frank. ‘You!’ She points at him, as though to inform him who he is. She bursts into laughter, still pointing. ‘What are you doing here?’

She is the first person he has met today for whom a year is not a minute, who doesn’t think she last spoke to him the day before. Good. Someone has noticed he has been gone.

‘Just passing through.’

He knows not to hurry to kiss her. They work to a different social clock down here. He can’t do any of that grab and shoulder-swivel stuff he does when he meets a woman he knows in Soho. Nor can he fall into her arms the way he does when he meets a man. Any hairy abrasions will have to come later. There’s no middle ground of companionable touching in Little Cleverley. In Little Cleverley you go from icy detachment to clawing each other to death in a single movement.

She comes across the shop floor to him and surreptitiously runs a long bloody finger down his shirtfront. ‘Mel with you?’

He shakes his head. Coming from Clarice, the question doesn’t carry what it might coming from someone else. His answer, too, is free of the usual opportunistic algebra – Mel no equals dick yes. That’s not how things compute with Clarice. Really, Mel ought to be here. Really, he ought to ring Mel on his mobile and put Clarice on. But he’s not sure he even remembers the number.